When he had gone, Edith stood thoughtfully looking at her hand. How his
own had trembled! Then she went to the telephone and called Helena.
“Have you had your breakfast, you old dear?”
“_Have_ I? I’m so happy and so hungry. Has the doctor gone, and is John
up?”
“John is not up, and the doctor has gone. He is terribly tired, Helena.”
“Of course he is. He hasn’t had his clothes off for two nights. You
should have seen him, Edith. He chummed with Bobbie like a boy, and then
when the little man was asleep he’d sit and watch him like a marble
statue. I had the queerest feeling about it. He didn’t seem quite human.
What fools we women are. Edith, I think I’m going to cry.”
“Don’t you dare, Helena Drummond! Be cold, be cold like Dr. Trench, for I
want some advice.”
The telephone seemed to blow its nose violently, and resumed its calm.
“What advice do you want?”
“Helena, I want to do something. Bobbie is just as much mine as he is
yours. So be a good girl and point out a dove for my offering, and I’ll
go after it, even if it flies out the window.”
“It’s dear of you, Edith. I suppose you can send a check to some of the
organisations for children. There’s the Welfare Association, and the Home
for the Friendless, and St. Joseph’s Home.”
“I was going to do that, anyhow. Which one shall I send it to?”
“I don’t know that it makes any difference. When the husband is a
deserter, the children have to be sent to one of the homes for a while,
and there are so many deserters that both places need money all the
while. Dr. Trench told me last night of a deserted Greek woman he saw
last week. Her husband went home to fight the Turks, and survived, but
didn’t come back to her. She was trying to keep her family from going
to either home. She has a baby two months old, and she was starving
herself and the baby to get food for the other two children. His young
Mr. Deland got track of her and took her two quarts of milk one evening
after the children had gone to bed, and she made gruel for herself with
the whole two quarts, and ate till midnight. I think the doctor tries to
handle such cases personally. He keeps his family of students looking
after them, and doubtless pays the bills himself. But it doesn’t cure
desertion.”
“No, I suppose not. But I want action. Can’t I work for the United
Charities? It won’t cost them a cent, and I’ll try not to bungle the job.”
“You can telephone and find out. I don’t know how much responsibility
they would let you assume.”
“What would I do?”
“I suppose it would depend on whether you were in the office, or out as a
visitor. You might ask to specialise in desertion. But you won’t get any
thanks.”
“I don’t want thanks.”
“Perhaps not, dear, but you want to consider. A friend of the doctor’s
was in the Court of Domestic Relations the other day for the United,
asking to have a professional beggar sent to the Bridewell. A paper wrote
him up as the authorised beggar trying to suppress competition!”
“Helena, are you trying to stop me?”
“You know I am not. I just want you to know what you’re entering upon.”
“Well, Helena, I give you warning that I’m about to enter upon
something. I’ll send beggars to the Bridewell, or I’ll bring the deserted
here and enlarge the family circle, unless you object.”
“Edith—you might consult Dr. Trench.”
V
The next day, as Trench came down into the hall, Edith was waiting for
him.
“You haven’t seen my plants, Dr. Trench. Can you spare the time?”
She led the way to the conservatory, where, in a shady nook, the
cypripediums stood in a bank of feathery moss, like green-robed girls
awaiting bloom and bridal. On the way back, Edith stopped beside a
wonderful begonia rex. “I learned something interesting about the
epidermis of begonia. In case of injury, it has a quite exceptional power
of restitution. Some guardian angel seems to weave the pattern again.”
“That is very interesting.”
“Isn’t it! When you said ‘exquisite mechanisms,’ of course you didn’t
mean _only_ mechanisms.”
“I’m not a botanist, my dear young graduate.”
“Well, you are the inspiration of a college girl; so you’d better answer
my question.”
“What question?”
“Is it only photochemistry that makes the begonia restore itself?”
“I presume so. But who cares?”
“I care,” she cried. “If it’s only chemistry in a leaf, you’ll say it’s
only chemistry in me.” She glanced at the scar on her hand.
Trench smiled gravely. “I shall not say anything that I’m not compelled
to say.”
“But if life is only chemistry, there is no heaven. Oh, if Bobbie—” She
could not go on.
“We love Bobbie,” said Trench, and the child’s father could not have
said it more gently. “But love would always stay the passing moment,
and nature will not have it so. I say ‘nature,’ regretting that it is
necessary to use any word.”
“Dr. Trench—is it possible that you look forward to absolute extinction?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
She pressed the scar as if it burned again.
“I have thought of you as the person who opened my eyes to the glory
of God’s world. I can’t get used to the change in a minute. Won’t you
sit down—here on this long wicker affair where Bobbie loves to read
fairy-tales?”
Trench did not comply. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that we can’t agree about
life, unless we agree that it consists of vain repetitions.”
“Surely not vain—oh, surely not. You must have practiced a hundred times
on dead throats, to have saved Bobbie’s living one.”
“This is a good place to stop, Miss Bridgman. I’m glad to leave you
cheerful.”
“Cheerful about what?”
“About the dead throats of other people’s nephews!”
She did not flinch. “If I am hard-hearted,” she said with dignity, “I am
willing to be told so.”
Trench sat down. He knew perfectly well that he was a fool to do it, but
he had long felt that it would come to this; he was doomed to confess.
“Very well, Miss Bridgman. Let us continue to speak of vain repetitions.
There are sunrises, for instance. They are an old story, and I dare say
that they tell you the old, old story of Jesus and his love. But to me
they are impersonal, and I am glad of it.”
“What bitter words! I fear that I have done you no good by asking
questions. I have—intruded.”
“You are welcome,” said certain vocal chords huskily, contracting against
their will.
“If I am really to be one of your friends,” she smiled, “I must learn
more. I think I’ll go back to the University and prove that life is a
good deal more than photochemistry. If you’ll come here in June, I’ll
tell you the result. Come when the first cypripedium opens. This year it
was on the twenty-eighth.”
“I’ll be here, June 28, 1914.”
“Thank you. And now I want to ask your advice about some social service.”
“Please do not.”
“But I feel so selfish. I am as useless as a cypripedium.”
“You are more beautiful than any cypripedium, but beauty is a sex fancy,
like religion. And of course you are useless. Use is another fancy.”
“Thank you almost to death, Dr. Trench. And what about yourself?”
“I’m an atom. And being an atom I don’t believe in the reformation of the
world by young-lady power.”
“You sound brutal, my friend, but I can’t forget Bobbie or our little
woodland Mildred. How is she?”
“She is beyond the fear of brutality.”
“What—our little one! Oh, was it necessary to take our little
flower-girl? She told me that she wanted those flowers when she died.”
“I saw her die, Miss Bridgman. I saw that operation. Her mother came out
of the ether badly.”
“Ether?”
“The ether we call religion. It is what deadens everybody.”
“Can you speak so, Dr. Trench? Can you ridicule all this splendid
collective effort that is beginning in the churches?”
“I do not ridicule a clinical picture. I see no difference between the
parents of illegitimates and the parents of slaughtered legitimates. One
group say they couldn’t help it, and they couldn’t. The others croon a
song called Precious Jewels, and breed again. For such people to organise
committees of fifteen is not collective effort, but collective insanity.”
It staggered her, of course. She was too deeply shocked to speak.
Trench softened his voice to a professional tone. “Gentlemen, the work of
saving sick babies is growing magnificently. The Welfare Association is
caring for three thousand a year, and the death-rate is only thirty in
the thousand. Very low, gentlemen.”
She smiled a little. “I love to hear you speak that way.”
“Of course.”
“Doctor, you evidently think me securely etherised. If you think my
throat needs an operation before it can tell the truth, I’m ready.”
Trench looked at her—young, beautiful, beloved—and would have turned
back. But he heard within him that echo of anguish—“May she never see her
baby lying like that.” He seemed once more to be in that lonely cabin on
that deadly night. At last he spoke.
“Mrs. Potter told her husband that she would never bear another child,
but she has one already. In speaking of it to you, I don’t wish to be
dogmatic or cocksure, but I do wish to be impersonal and honest. And it
seems to me that every child born should be considered a unit in infantry
sent out against appalling odds. By using the lives of infants man has
overrun the earth. He thins out his own numbers for the greater security
of the survivors—and is the only animal who does so. I don’t call man
the most cruel of all the animals, for he doesn’t know what he is doing;
he is born callous, and the chemical impulses that drive him give off a
religious vapour that deludes him. Still there is the fact—comfort at
the expense of infanticide, whether bloodless or armed. And the standard
of comfort has risen so high that a great war is probably at hand. The
barometer of the birthrate is falling rapidly, but not because we pity
children. We are more considerate of cows, grain, and mothers, because
we’ve got to have cleverer sons to exterminate our enemies. What is going
on is the unobserved, scientific extermination of every stupid enemy. The
Welfare Association is merely a group of opium-eaters, who don’t know
that they save weak children because any one of them may have a brain
that will exterminate thousands. I do not blame them. I am in the same
business.”
“Horrible!”
“Exactly. If mothers understood the situation, there would be no
children. But it will take a great war to make them see the point, and
then they’ll forget it.”
Edith was silent.
“Now and then,” continued Trench gravely, “an animal has emerged who
understood it. I conceive Jesus to have been such an animal.”
“It hurts.”
“I thought it would. Shall I stop?”
“No! This is your confessional!”
“Jesus saw life as it is, and desired its speedy extinction. The
mechanism of his agony made him dream of relief. It manufactured an
idyllic future life—a perfectly impossible cycle of nutrition without
reproduction. He declined myrrh and hyssop, but he offered paradise to
the crucified thief, and the uncrucified thieves have been using that
drug ever since.”
Edith grew pale.
Trench waited a minute till he saw the blood return to her face. “Animal
indifference still keeps us going, and women protect themselves. They
take this twilight sleep, this belief in a future life for defeated
young. Women believe in heaven, and that is why they marry.”
“Doctor—I’m strangling!”
“Steady! The blind instinct comes first. With Christ, heaven was an
afterthought of mercy. With men and women, it is an afterthought of the
reproductive instinct. The operation is over, and you are coming out of
the ether. Steady—don’t struggle.”
But Edith clutched at her throat.
“Oh, base and cruel! And this is your unspeakable philosophy. I don’t
believe there is a thinker in the world who would subscribe to it. I’ll
find out. I’ll get the arguments. Here and now I declare war on you.”
But suddenly her voice softened. “In spite of all your dreadful
pessimism, you’ve got to advise me. I’ve sent the Welfare Association
a check, but that is nothing. It is too impersonal. I want my love for
Bobbie to take some better form. I want to be personal—like you.”
Trench burst into bitter laughter as he rose. “‘Personal like me’ is
simply stunning. But I can’t advise you. Personal effort is a gross
illusion, as if one child set out to stop a war. But waste your sweetness
where you will.”
Edith caught her breath. His scorn had stung her into a bold thought. “I
won’t be laughed at, Dr. Trench. I’ve stood my operation and live to tell
the tale, but if you laugh at me I’ll make you smart.”
“You can’t.”
“Think again, Dr. Trench. You like to be impersonal. But what about
impersonal passion?”
Trench stopped short in his tracks. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? Don’t you know men who have it? Did it never occur to you
that impersonal could be used in that sense? There are wretched girls in
Chicago who have been loved impersonally enough.”
Trench ought to have expected some such retort, and might have been
expected to meet it readily. But such was not the case. It struck him
like an angina, crushing the breath out of him. It disorganised all his
old adaptations. In this world it makes a difference who says a thing,
and this fact was coming home to Trench as he stood with parted and
paling lips. But he recovered from that dismay, and the real Trench spoke.
“I understand you at last. If you can be a personal friend to any girl
who stands within that danger, go to her.”
“Where shall I go?”
Trench thought a moment, his face set like marble. “Go to Ischl’s
clothing factory.”